When I was a kid I was already fascinated with data. I would leaf through the yellow pages and wonder how it helped people connect. I lived that dream and now it's no longer just about connecting, but searching and getting found. This blog is about my work as a "stitcher". There's so much we could do here at home and I am just plain happy whenever I manage to stitch people together.(Oh, BTW everything here is my personal opinion.)

Monday, October 22, 2007

My friend was weirded out about getting emails in Spanish - emails that didn't look like spam, but were subscriptions on something. What it was, we didn't know because the whole email was written in Spanish.

And then I remembered, we could actually translate the text! So I quickly went to Google Translate, copied and pasted some of the text from the email. From the translated text we found out that it was a subscription to an online magazine and there was an unsubscribe link to it. Problem solved!

BTW, with Google Translate you can translate text or a website in a number of languages, do translated search (like search in i.e. English and then get results in Spanish) and then you can also find words in the dictionary. Pretty nifty huh?

At least now whenever some of my friends sent me emails in another language (they like doing that to me) or whenever I want to read blogger friends who write in another language, I can easily translate what they wrote and understand what they're trying to say.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

A few weeks ago Blogger launched Blogger Play and I thought that it's really cool to see photos as they are uploaded. I get transfixed with the thought of peering into the lives of other people - makes you realize that you are just one of the many, many unique people in the whole wide world. Weird huh.

Anyway, I also like tinkering around my iGoogle page (which is now available in Filipino, which means you can get feeds written in Filipino as well) and I've so far placed some fish to feed, a flying pig, the weather (I monitor Manila, Legaspi and Davao coz I have dear friends and relatives in the area), a to-do list and I've recently added the Blogger Play gadget.

What are you waiting for? Try it! Try it! Just sign-in to your iGoogle using your Google Account (which is also your Gmail account) or if you're already logged-in just type http://www.google.com/ig in another tab (for Mozilla Firefox users) and the page will come out. Then include the gadget in your page by clicking on "add a gadget" (magdagdag ng bagay-bagay) and look for (or search) Blogger Play, then just click on the "add" button. When you go back to your iGoogle homepage the gadget will be there and you can just move it around the page.

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

MYX is ABS-CBN's music video channel that I personally love and I was really happy when they decided to have their own custom channel in Youtube.

A custom channel is like having your own TV channel. You can upload your personally made videos and you can use this to promote your company's products and services or you can use this to keep in touch with your family and friends by sharing videos of your adventures and misadventures (if any).

My custom channel is a mix of a lot of things - mostly music videos I get to take whenever I attend music-related events or videos with my family and friends. I'd want to do some DIY videos though, maybe when I manage to budget some time for it I would.

How to make your own Youtube Custom Channel? It's easy! Just visit Youtube, sign-up for an account and then play around with the settings and then upload your videos. And you don't need a video camera to create videos - I just normally use my digital camera and maybe I'll try using my webcam as well. I don't even edit my videos (and that's one thing I really want to start doing). It's that easy. And it's FREE!